When any one is sick, the doctor is sent for, and the family are all impatient until he arrives.  If the case is a bad one, he is looked upon as a ministering angel; the patient’s eye brightens when he comes, and all in the house feel more cheerful for hours after.  Amid all kinds of weather, at all hours in the day or night, he obeys the summons, and brings all his skill, acquired by long study, and by much laborious practice, to bear upon the disease.  But when the sick person gets well, the doctor is forgotten; and when the bill appears, complaint at its amount is almost always made; and too frequently, unless he proceed to legal measures, it is entirely withheld from him.  These things ought not so to be.  Of course, there are many honourable exceptions; but every physician can exclaim—­“Would that their number was greater!”

THE LITTLE BOUND-BOY.

In a miserable old house, in Commerce street, north of Pratt street Baltimore,—­there are fine stores there now—­lived a shoemaker, whose wife took a particular fancy to me as a doctor, (I never felt much flattered by the preference,) and would send for me whenever she was sick.  I could do no less than attend her ladyship.  For a time I tried, by pretty heavy bills, to get rid of the honour; but it wouldn’t do.  Old Maxwell, the husband, grumbled terribly, but managed to keep out of my debt.  He was the reputed master of his house; but I saw enough to satisfy me that if he were master, his wife was mistress of the master.

Maxwell had three or four apprentices, out of whom he managed to get a good deal of work at a small cost.  Among these was a little fellow, whose peculiarly delicate appearance often attracted my attention.  He seemed out of place among the stout, vulgar-looking boys, who stitched and hammered away from morning until night in their master’s dirty shop.

“Where did you get that child?” I asked of the shoemaker one day.

“Whom do you mean?  Bill?”

“Yes, the little fellow you call Bill.”

“I took him out of pure charity.  His mother died about a year and a half ago, and if I hadn’t taken him in, he would have gone to the poor house as like as not.”

“Who was his mother?”

“She was a poor woman, who sewed for the slopshops for a living—­but their pay won’t keep soul and body together.”

“And so she died?”

“Yes, she died, and I took her child out of pure charity, as I have said.”

“Is he bound to you?”

“Oh yes.  I never take a boy without having him bound.”

“What was his mother’s name?”

“I believe they called her Mrs. Miller.”

“Did you ever meet with her?”

“No:  but my wife knew her very well.  She was a strange kind of woman—­feeling something above her condition, I should think.  She was always low-spirited, my wife says, but never complained about any thing.  Bill was her only child, and he used to go for her work, and carry it home when it was finished.  She sent him out, too, to buy every thing.  I don’t believe she would have stirred beyond her own door if she had starved to death.”